June 5 2008 8:51 AM by Adam
filed under ColdFusion (25 comments)

Breaking news coming out of Scotch on the Rocks 2008. Railo, an alternative CFML engine, just announced their intent to open source their product in partnership with Redhat/JBoss! I don't have all the details yet, as I'm writing this entry prior to their formal announcement

The Facts

• Railo will become part of JBoss.org at Redhat and may be distributed with future versions of JBoss. This means that you will be able to natively develop CFML applications on JBoss without needing to purchase a thing. If you are a Java developer, building a traditional JEE application, now there is no reason not to dabble with a little CFML for your views.
• The project will be under GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL2) which means that you can include Railo in your own distributions, without changing you current license, as long as you keep the source unaltered and open (even if you're including it in a commercial product) .
• They are moving to a _single_ license model. Railo has no plans to sell their Enterprise edition once the project has been merged into the JBoss project. You will however, be able to purchase world-class support directly from Redhat! <DISCLAIMER>This is what I was told by Gert, but may not be 100% accurate as his presentation seemed to say they would continue to sell the Enterprise edition</DISCLAIMER>
• The JBoss team will be actively contributing to the project. Currently they are exploring ways to integrate Hibernate and JBoss Cluster Cache directly into CFML.

So, you may be wondering why Adam, the anti-open-source 'disaster', is so supportive of this recent move. To put it simply; Railo is moving to an open source model for all the right reasons. All the issues that made me skeptical of OpenBD don't exist with Railo.

Expanding the Community

I've had the pleasure of speaking to Gert Franz, the man behind Railo, on a number of occasions. Last year he even visited my home for a BBQ and we talked a lot about extending the CFML community. Gert's plan is brilliant. Partnering with JBoss will expose CFML to the greater Java community. Additionally, CFML is now being recognized as a mainstream programming language by RedHat, a major player in the Enterprise space. There is nothing stopping a JBoss developer from dipping out of the JSP world to use a little CFML. Railo/JBoss are focused outside of our community. They aren't concerned with converting existing ColdFusion customers to their platform. They are focused on bringing Java developers to CFML. Maybe that's just what they are telling me, but given the character of the Railo team and their history, I believe them.

LGPL > GPLv3

Personally, I think LGPL is much more community friendly than GPLv3. If the community builds an awesome new feature for Railo, there is nothing stopping Adobe, OpenBD or Smith from incorporating those features. That means contributing to Railo, actually means you are contributing the greater CFML community (not just a sole project). With the GPLv3 license that OpenBD uses, there was never a chance of your contributions could ever make it into Adobe ColdFusion. I'd hope the current contributors to OpenBD will see this and move to Railo immediately. Of course, Railo would have the same problem as the other engines. They are servicing a community that doesn't necessarily write Java. So it's a lot harder to recruit contributors. Thankfully, JBoss is contributing to the development along with the existing Railo team!

The 'Upgrade'

Railo's end-game isn't to sell a commercial license, at least that's what I've been told (still need to confirm). This would make the project a lot friendlier to Adobe. The Railo team runs a very successful consulting and support business and that's their angle. They aren't just open sourcing their lesser used version, while holding the keys to the 'enterprise' one. Although we've never rested on our laurels and sold ColdFusion just for the language, this puts even more pressure on us at Adobe to truly innovate and add value to the platform. Back in CFMX days there was an internal shift regarding ColdFusion's value proposition. Previously, the primary motivation to buy ColdFusion was for the language itself. Since then we've been focused on adding value to the server and integration. If we do our job right, JBoss/Railo will bring in new CFML developers and they'll 'upgrade' to ColdFusion.

The Downside

Really I'm not seeing much a downside here. I think the only weakness of the relationship between Railo and JBoss.org is that Railo will be forced to only implement JBoss solutions. The presentation talked about Hibernate (good) and JBoss Cache (ok), but then started to talk about the other JBoss projects. Workflow = JBoss BPM, JMS = JBoss JMS, etc. You can see the pattern here. While I whole heartly agree that Hibernate is the best ORM in existence for Java, I'm not sure I'd say that for each and every JBoss product. Railo may find themselves being constrained and not able to take the best of open-source and certainly wont be able to OEM. Additionally, if they tie themselves directly to JBoss features, Railo may lose it's portability, limiting from WebSphere, OracleAS and WebLogic customers.

Stay Tuned

The details are coming fast, I'll try and keep this post updated as I get more clarification…